*This post originally appeared on the AppSense blog prior to the rebrand in January 2017, when AppSense, LANDESK, Shavlik, Wavelink, and HEAT Software merged under the new name Ivanti.

As Valerus, a leading energy company, rapidly grew in size, its IT team faced a number of challenges around managing user data. In particular, the team found it difficult to support and manage an expanding user population that stored files in a broad array of locations.

“Our policy was to put data on the corporate file share, and we had many users who were doing that, but also had many who weren’t,” said Robert Allen, IT Director, Infrastructure and Security Services at Valerus. “This led to sprawl over the years with the number of servers, and users were putting files in different places, making it very hard to manage.”

The IT team also found themselves spending a lot of time supporting users who wanted, or needed, to work offline and saved their data locally. Users often found that, on reconnecting to the network, they experienced significant problems with file synchronization.

Since they were already managing desktop user personalization and policy with AppSense DesktopNow, the addition of DataNow was a logical next step to further optimize their desktop environment.

“DataNow fit well within our environment and gave us total control. We really liked the range of management capabilities included in the solution,” says Allen. “Once it was in place, users were instructed to move all files they want backed up into the DataNow folder so they could access it from any one of their devices, and that worked really well.”

With DataNow, Valerus has control over where users store their files. This was an important requirement for the organization, since the company’s policies do not allow use of cloud storage for corporate data. Keeping the data on-premises also allowed Valerus to maintain all existing user access control settings and policies, rather than losing or recreating them.

“All user documents are saved in the DataNow folder and items are synced whether they’re created on or off the network. It’s flawless,” said Allen. “It’s everything that we were promised it would be, and as someone who uses it daily, I’m really happy with it.”

To learn more about Valerus and how AppSense has helped other organizations with user data management challenges, please visit our case study library.

About Valerus

Valerus is a worldwide industry leader in oil and gas handling equipment, operations and services, specializing in wellhead production, compression, processing and treating. The experienced oilfield professionals at Valerus provide complete, integrated, innovative solutions, and their strategic inventory and distribution network can have them on the ground and operational in record time, anywhere in the world.